"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." --Thomas Jefferson

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

At last... God's Country!

The fam and I made our yearly week-long trek to the Tahoe area all the way back in late June-early July. Unfortunately, our hard drive was too full to unload the camera pictures, and at the same time, our disk drive went belly-up, so I couldn't transfer anything to CD so I could get it off the computer. These issues have now been fixed, so now it's time to show some drop-dead gorgeous images of one of the most beautiful places in existence. I have shown pictures of this area before: here, here, and here. No matter how many times I go however, I always seem to find something new to photograph. So without further ado:

The first morning there. The kids are thinking, "What should we do first?" They are also watching the squirrels eating the peanuts being tossed to them.

Echo Peak - A couple of days later, I would be standing at its summit; and what a climb that is!

Ah! Feel the morning sun; smell the fresh mountain air.

Every kid should have the opportunity to climb some nice big granite rocks!

Every kid should also have the opportunity to play on a beach like this!

Aaaaaaaaaah! The feet are propped up, the mountain breeze is softly blowing on me, I have my summer reading book with me. What a life! The book by the way is the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. What an amazing life, and what an amazing read.

Well, enough of this relaxing and reading on the beach stuff; it was time to climb to the summit of Echo Peak, which you saw earlier. This picture does a great job of conveying to you some idea of the steepness of the climb. The Team Guts shirt you see me wearing is from a Track/X-Country running camp at which I coach every year. I wore the shirt this day as sort of an inside joke, because due to my out-of-shapeness and the 8,000 foot altitude, I usually end up throwing up at some point during this hike. I was able to hold on to my cookies this year. It must have been the few workouts on the stairmaster that I fit into my schedule during the month of June.

I wish I could say that you are looking at the morning mist, but instead, that would be smoke from the thousands of fires that were burning in California at the time.

Only halfway to the summit, yet look at the view already.

Only a few yards to the summit of Echo Peak. You think the wind blows much during the winter?

I made it to the summit of Echo Peak - elevation 8,895 feet.

At the summit, you can hang your feet over a 200 foot cliff and look 2000 feet down to the lakes below.

A beautiful view of Fallen Leaf Lake and Lake Tahoe beyond that.

Alpine wildflowers at the summit of Echo Peak.

What goes up must come down, but it is always fun to look back up at where I was. Then I wonder how the hell I managed to get up there in the first place.

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Your Humble Blogger

I am native of the mountains of northern California; 12-year veteran of the U.S. Army and California National Guard; Secondary School History teacher; Husband; Father of Two; and three-time honoree as Time Magazine's Person of the Year (2003, 2006, 2011).